1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a monitoring host apparatus, an image forming apparatus, a monitoring system of the image forming apparatus including an information processing apparatus, and an access control method for an access to their WEB pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a system for monitoring, from a remote place, operating states of image forming apparatuses connected to a LAN (Local Area Network) and image forming apparatuses such as a printer and the like exists. In such a system, a plurality of image forming apparatuses and a monitoring host for monitoring those apparatuses mutually communicate through the LAN, a WAN (Wide Area Network), or the Internet. Each image forming apparatus periodically notifies the monitoring host of information such as the number of print sheets and the like and also notifies the monitoring host of information indicative of a jam, an alarm, an error, and the like at timing of the occurrence of them.
On the monitoring host side which received the notifications, the contents of such notifications are accumulated and managed, an operating situation of the image forming apparatus is discriminated, and a countermeasure and the like against a fault which occurred in the image forming apparatus are also performed.
The information accumulated and managed in the monitoring host can be browsed from the outside by using a WEB browser or the like which is operating in a client PC. In such a case, generally, an administrator of the monitoring host forms an authentication account/password for browsing and provides it to a reader and the user accesses the monitoring host from an authentication display screen 702 in FIG. 13 by using the authentication account (user name)/password.
A method whereby access authentication between the user and a server is made through an apparatus which mediates the authentication has been proposed (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-078523). According to such a method, organism feature information to specify the user and apparatus information to mediate the authentication are preliminarily managed on the server side. The organism feature information input from the user and the apparatus information of the apparatus to mediate the authentication are combined and the access authentication is made on the server side.
However, in the case where the authentication display screen 702 in FIG. 13 is used as a method of authenticating the access to the monitoring host from the user as in the related art, the administrator on the monitoring host side needs to issue the authentication account/password every user and perform a maintenance of them. The user also needs to continuously manage the issued authentication account (user name)/password without forgetting them. Those operations are troublesome to both of the administrator and the user. Particularly, when the number of users is large, an operation load on the administrator of the monitoring host is very large.
In the case of using the authenticating method using the organism feature information as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-078523 mentioned above, at least the managing operation of the account and the password on the user side is unnecessary. However, to send the organism feature information to the monitoring host side, a special apparatus for reading the organism information is necessary. In the case where such an authenticating method is used in the general monitoring system of the image forming apparatus, it is not practical since high costs are required.